When it comes to song topics, love is number one, but travel may be a close second. In a gazillion tunes, it seems, someone is hopping on or off a train, boat or plane. (There was even a Dionne Warwick hit called “Trains and Boats and Planes.”) And in many other songs, they’re jumping in their cars or thumbing a ride in someone else’s.

“Within the next decade we’ll be flying people to Australia from New York in about two hours, developing spaceships that will cross continents outside the Earth’s atmosphere and then pop them back into the atmosphere. Then we’ll move on to much bigger commercial jets [traveling] at many times the speed of sound.”

Some of my favorite new and old television series are available on disc, which means you can enjoy them in flight. This alphabetical list of 15 recommended DVD and Blu-ray sets includes something for everyone—comedies, dramas, cop shows, even a couple of documentaries. What they have in common is quality.

Some private flyers seem to want to remain “under the radar.” They like that they can avoid interaction with the general public by leaving and arriving via inconspicuous FBOs, and they travel on unmarked jets, sometimes with the protection of the National Business Aviation Association’s Blocked Aircraft Registration Request program.

Unless you hang your hat in Delaware or New Hampshire or live in one of the few countries that don’t assess sales tax, you probably hand money to the government almost every time you buy something. In many U.S.

Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana, one of my favorite books, offers compelling evidence of how fast our world is being transformed. On page after page, we see products, services, vocations and styles that once seemed integral to daily life but have nearly or completely disappeared. Remember milkmen? Carbon paper? Phone booths? Drive-in movies?

You need only glance at our first cover, from October 2003, to see how far Business Jet Traveler has come. We began as an outgrowth of Aviation International News, our company’s 41-year-old trade magazine, and in our early issues, seemed more like a clone than an offspring.

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Quote/Unquote

“[New billionaires in fast-growing countries] have to buy longer-range airplanes. If you’re flying from Mongolia to Nigeria, it’s either a three-day journey flying commercial or a nine-hour flight on your jet.”